Ever since the first electronic mail document was transmitted from one computer to another in 1971, people have increasingly adopted electronic mail as a convenient and relatively quick means of communication. Today it is estimated that over 60 billion electronic mail, or e-mail, documents are transmitted between computers around the world each day. Additionally, people today rely on computer networks to transfer other types of files, other than e-mail documents, such as binary encoded executable files.
The computers that transfer e-mail and other electronic documents, networks connecting the computers, and applications used to create, send, and receive the electronic documents have changed dramatically during this period of explosive growth. In 1969, the Internet consisted of just four interconnected host computer systems. Today, the Internet has grown to tens of millions of interconnected computer systems. Early e-mail documents consisted largely of text-only characters entered at so-called dumb terminals that communicated with mainframe computers. Today most e-mails are conveniently created by individuals using personal computers, laptop computers, palm-type computer, personal organizers, and even such devices as cellular telephones. People transfer various types of files using a variety of different communication protocols. While much of the explosive growth in e-mail usage has been positive, with more and more people increasingly using e-mail, some of this growth has been negative. To understand why some of the growth has been negative, one needs to have a fundamental understanding of how computers generally send electronic documents from one computer to the next.
Each computer on the Internet is part of a network. Many individuals connect to networks of local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) using modems in their homes. Businesses generally connect groups of computers together forming Local Area Networks. Internet Service Providers and businesses connect their networks to other networks and communications devices comprising various other larger networks and Internet backbones, which are connected in some fashion. Essentially, the Internet is a collection of interconnected networks. Special computers on the Internet, called routers, receive commands conforming to differing protocols and execute those commands, sending information between other routers and computers running client and server applications. For example, to send an e-mail document a person may create a message using a computer program, called an e-mail client, and send it to an e-mail recipient by sending the e-mail to a computer on the Internet running an e-mail server application. Based on the address information contained in or attached to the e-mail, the server will work with other server applications and usually transfer the e-mail document to a computer which temporarily stores the document until it is retrieved by the recipient using another e-mail client application.
One powerful feature of e-mail clients is that they have the ability to send e-mail documents to more than one user. For example, the person in the example above could create a single message but send it to fifty friends. While this feature may be convenient for most individuals, it has been the subject of abuse by certain individuals and companies. For example, an unscrupulous person may want to sell a certain product to as many people that he or she can contact. This person may describe the item in an e-mail and send copies of the e-mail to hundreds and thousands of e-mail recipients. Such unsolicited mail, often referred to as spam, cost businesses in the United States alone more than $10 billion dollars and accounted for almost half of all U.S. internet e-mail traffic in 2003. Additionally, handling these electronic documents increases network communication loads, consumes server storage space, and costs individuals time in having to read and delete them. Today, most of this spam is undesirable and most ISPs work hard to combat it from clogging their systems.
A method that ISPs and other network and system administrators have adopted to combat spam is called blacklisting. Described in its most simple form, various ISPs and organizations maintain databases of computer systems, or servers, that are suspected or known to be sources of active spam generation. For instance, when a spammer generates spam e-mail and sends it to e-mail recipients, the ISPs, organizations, and special detection routines running on e-mail servers, detect such usage, flag the server or computer source of the e-mail, and add it to blacklist, block, or suspect databases. In subsequent transfers of e-mail, servers are programmed to detect where e-mails originate and reject them if they originate from or pass through a server or computer listed in one of the databases.
While the practice of blacklisting has helped reduce spam, it has unfortunate consequences. A major problem caused by blacklisting is the blocking of legitimate e-mail. For example, an e-mail server may be owned by an ISP and used to send e-mail for hundreds of subscribers of the ISP. A spammer may exploit some security flaw in the server, gain control of it, and use it to send out thousands of spam e-mail documents. Consequently, such usage may get flagged and cause the server to be added to one or more of the blacklist databases. Once blacklisted, e-mail servers on the Internet start rejecting even legitimate e-mail documents sent from the blacklisted servers. When servers reject e-mail from a blacklisted server, they will often send a response message to the sender of the e-mail, saying that the e-mail has been rejected. However, the sender is most often just a simple ISP subscriber, incapable or ill-equipped to resolve the problem. The subscriber usually does not know who to contact or how to remedy the problem. Additionally, the sender may not even realize the e-mail was rejected and be expecting a reply, leading to frustration, disappointment, and maybe friction between the sender and the intended recipient. Ultimately, an administrator of the ISP must usually remedy the problem of the server and remedy the blacklisting status of the server, not the subscriber.
There are currently only a few ways an e-mail sender may remedy the situation. The sender may send the e-mail again using a different server. The sender may contact the ISP of the server and ask them to fix the problem causing the server to be blacklisted. The sender may send the message using another ISP having a different server. The sender may use a different e-mail address for the recipient, if they have one, causing the e-mail to be delivered using a different server which may not use blacklisting or have the blacklisted server in its database. The sender may even resort to calling the recipient by phone to convey the message.
Given the current art, therefore, alternative methods, systems, and computer program products are needed to alert ISP providers and system administrators about computer systems, servers, and other applications that are suspect. Such alternative methods, systems, and programs may help restore the computer systems back to normal operation much sooner, may reduce the quantity of rejected e-mail that is legitimate, and may eliminate involving individuals incapable of resolving the problems.